Hospitals typically include a variety of devices in patient rooms to enable the patient to communicate with a nurses' station. The hospital room communication devices may include a nurse call button, a microphone, a speaker, and the like. These devices enable the patient, or a nurse in the patient's room, to exchange a variety of emergency and non-emergency information with the nurses' station. These communications devices can be implemented as part of a larger network that services multiple rooms and floors of a hospital. Such networks may implement a TCP/IP protocol in which the hospital room devices are individually addressable, which enables a networked monitoring system to recognize which room a call is coming from.
As will be appreciated, these room communications devices can be used in the event of a patient emergency. As such, it is important that the devices be functional at all times. Where a portion of the communication network malfunctions, however, continued communication between patient rooms and nurses' stations can be compromised. Current systems address this issue by employing one or more additional Ethernet cables, connected between the room communications devices and the nurses' station, to provide a dedicated path for the room communications devices.